LAS VEGAS —SAP AG today announced that the SAP Startup Focus program has achieved broad adoption, with more than 1,000 startups from more than 55 countries participating. The program began in March 2012 and in 19 months has achieved significant momentum in the market. The startups develop innovative solutions on top of the SAP HANA platform, such as real-time credit card fraud analysis, retail-specific analytical algorithms and fully integrated Big Data smart grid solutions for energy utilities’ providers. In addition, the “powered by SAP HANA” certification and branding initiative by SAP encourages independent software vendors (ISVs) to develop applications on top of SAP HANA. The announcement was made at SAP TechEd 2013, being held October 21-25 in Las Vegas, where more than 30 startups are on site showcasing their innovative solutions.

The SAP Startup Focus program enables Big Data, predictive and real-time analytics startups to run better by supporting them in developing innovative applications on the cutting edge in-memory database platform SAP HANA. The overall goal of the program is to spur innovation and provide startups with the technology, support, resources and community needed to develop their applications on top of the SAP HANA platform and at no cost. Examples include:

Next Principles is a California-based startup that provides an analytics application to help companies gain actionable insights from social media conversations. The company was one of the first to be certified as “powered by SAP HANA,” and earlier this month it received funding from the SAP HANA Real Time Fund as part of its Series A round.

Feedzai, a Portugal-based startup that provides a real-time machine learning application to help financial institutions prevent fraud before it occurs, was the first company in the SAP Startup Focus program to be funded by the SAP HANA Real Time Fund. The recent announcement that SAP Ventures has raised US$1 billion in one year further demonstrates the incredible potential for data-focused startups.

Czech-based startup Semantic Visions provides a range of information solutions based on one of the world’s largest news database and powerful semantic engine. It structures, categorizes and recognizes trends, finds breaking news before it breaks and provides this to customers, including broadcast networks and news agencies.

“Since our company has run the world’s largest semantic news database and hit the limits of traditional database technology, I decided to migrate our system to SAP HANA to be able to effectively explore immense amount of knowledge hidden in our 35 TB database,” said Frantisek Vrabel, CEO, Semantic Visions. “Only through our engagement in the SAP Startup Focus program, we were able to build a futuristic solution for real-time prediction analysis of supply chain disruptions in less than six months. The help and level of support we are getting is just priceless.”

The “powered by SAP HANA” certification initiative embraces ISVs and startups developing applications that tap into the capabilities of SAP HANA and it allows customers to easily distinguish applications powered by SAP HANA. Third-party applications that display the “powered by SAP HANA” brand have been certified by the SAP® Integration and Certification Center to capitalize on the distinctive capabilities and application logic within SAP HANA. This initiative is open to the broad community of developers, startups, integrators and ISVs.

For more information, including additional announcements and coverage from SAP TechEd Las Vegas, visit the SAP Newsroom. Follow SAP on Twitter at @sapnews and @SAPStartups.